Open Letter To Staff OfWestchester Medical Center - University Hospital

On Saturday, October 26, 2002, my daughter Theodora Coutsoukis suffered a grand mal seizure and she was rushed to your emergency room by ambulance.

While at the pediatric emergency room area, I was informed that she was there also on the preceding Monday as well as on other recent occasions, events that were not reported to me, as required by court order.

I made it a point to let every one know, including physicians, that my child is in desperate need of anticonvulsant medication, pleading with them to prescribe it for her, and also that I felt strongly that denying her life-saving medication was a crime that put her life in danger.

I pointed out that on a prior occasion of an emergency admission, in May 2002, their hospital pediatric neurologist had stated that she wanted to keep Teddy at the hospital for neurological tests and that she should be put on medication. Instead, the hospital discharged my child at once, without administering neurological tests and without prescribing the needed medication.

In spite of this, your on-call pediatric neurologist on 10/26/02, who spent quite a bit of time interviewing me and Teddy's mother, refused to prescribe any of the many available drugs that prevent seizures, but instead prescribed a medicine that supposedly would help stop a seizure while it is in progress.

This is no different than to deny a cardiac patient with clogged arteries, high cholesterol and high blood pressure any appropriate preventative treatment or medication, and instead giving him some amyl nitrate.

This sort of inhumane treatment was justified by your on-call pediatric neurologist by saying that he did not want to interfere with the treatment by one of his colleagues.

Darryl DeVivo has previously justified this inhumane mistreatment of my child, which has resulted in severe new brain damage and mental retardation to a child who was born healthy and brilliant, by stating that her mother asked that she be placed on a ketogenic diet instead of the medication which she previously took under the direction of a competent pediatric neurologist, and which had resulted in spectacular recovery beyond all expectation.

More recently, Darryl De Vivo issued a status report stating that for two years after Teddy's first two emergency hospitalizations she had no seizures, thus lending credibility to his inhumane treatment of my child. He did so, while being aware that during those two years the mother had fled the Oregon jurisdiction and did not work, devoting her time to a vicious campaign of persecution that resulted in the since disgraced judge Braslow granting custody to the mother. As a consequence, the mother was the only witness to Teddy's frequent grand mal seizures which she concealed, and she instructed others to only take Teddy to the emergency room "if she becomes unresponsive for more than 15 minutes"

It is obvious that Darryl DeVivo is more concerned with the preservation of his dubious reputation as a researcher than with the preservation of my child's life. His inhumane actions are immoral, unethical and illegal, yet tolerated by America's corrupt, profiteering medical establishment.

By consenting to this sort of mistreatment of a helpless child, and by willingly, knowingly and repeatedly refusing to administer to Teddy the readily available and effective treatment, such as the various known seizure preventing drugs, your "physicians" and the rest of your establishment have become nothing more than colluding collaborators of those who have ruined my child; inhumane criminals posing as medical practitioners for the sole purpose of personal gain.